


what a mess we've made of you

by Ias, th_esaurus



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Polyamory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 02:11:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17819816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias, https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: Sophia adored to hear Francis say his name. The gentleness he bestowed upon that single syllable, when it had been all envious vitriol before. He had only ever said her name with a sigh, and varying levels of hurt hidden under his breath, but James had gone from sinner to saint. Francis murmured his name now like something exalted.





	what a mess we've made of you

“I begin to see,” James said, strained, around a hiccuped inhale, “why she might have caught your eye, Francis—”

Sophia, quite at her leisure, canted the tip of her two forefingers upwards. Francis had chided her, privately, to go easy on James - his legs were not what they once were after their trudging hike half way across the northern hemisphere - but Sophia had a mind of her own and loved to watch a man’s thighs tremble and sweat. “It’s rude,” she said, “to speak of a lady as if she were not present.”

“My—ah, my apologies, Miss Cracroft.” It was a fair struggle for James to get the words out, and he clung to Francis’ wrist like a holy man clutching his bible. His hair was already damp from the effort, but Francis’ thick fingers carded through it nonetheless; his skin was dry and ungentle these days, but perhaps the sensation only piqued James’ pleasure even more.

Sophia braced a hand in the warm pit behind his knee, and began to fuck James in earnest.

“I wonder if it will be strange to call me ‘Mrs Crozier’,” she said idly, sly.

Francis barked back at once. “He shall have no say in the matter.” He had become even more proprietary about her after she accepted, without hesitation, his third proposal. It made her giddy, then, that he shared their companionship - a tidy euphemism for it - so easily with Fitzjames.

“Should I practise, hmm, Francis?” James needled him, and Francis leant down to peck a kiss on his lips, somehow a chastising kiss. She adored watching this tit-for-tat between James and Francis, so similar to her own early, heady days with him, before he was a Captain and might have given up everything to be with her. Just as there was danger in his pursuit of her, there was constant risk in the depth of his affection for James, for both of them - all three, if they were at last to be married.

And yet, like this, a knot of pale limbs atop the bedsheets, nothing too private to be bared for view—

“How much can he take?” Sophia asked Francis, her playfulness all at once turned lusty.

Francis’ eyes darkened at once, a syrupy pleasure flooding him. “Another, if you’re careful.”

James groaned in anticipation, bringing Francis’s hand to his mouth as if preempting his own noisy keening. He was, they both knew, not a quiet man in the throes of it. But Francis liked to hear the proof of a job well done, and instead smoothed both his palms along James’s jaw, down his long, strained neck, to rest at his shoulders and give him ballast while Sophia, unladylike, spat upon her fingers where they breached him and eased in a third—

“How—” James panted, as though talking was his only defence against blaspheming, “does a woman of your—means and stature—?”

He could not finish. Sophia, quite nonchalantly, had run the flat of her tongue across his prick, from root to tip. Her mouth, they had discovered early, did very little for him in prolonged stints - “Not a fault of your sex, but of my proclivities,” James had apologised, flushed; though his bashfulness was unnecessary with Francis there to finish the job. Nonetheless, she liked to torture him in fits and starts.

“Years of trial and error,” Francis answered drily, and it delighted Sophia to recall his flustered refusal, the mortal offence he took when she had first suggested they might add a little spice to their sugar. “I hope you appreciate the fruits of our labour, James.”

Sophia adored to hear Francis say his name. The gentleness he bestowed upon that single syllable, when it had been all envious vitriol before. He had only ever said her name with a sigh, and varying levels of hurt hidden under his breath, but James had gone from sinner to saint. Francis murmured his name now like something exalted.

All at once she was hungry to see them together. “Francis,” she whined, mock-petulant, “my wrist is tiring and I have made him ever so loose for you.”

“No stamina—” James tried to cajole her, but he was rent by the loss of her fingers and could only finish his thought with a empty keen that made Francis’ skin flare, blushed all over, his blood rising to console James in his moment of need.

There was a clamour of grunts and soft laughter as they traded places, clambering over James’s long, lurid body, peppering kisses across his sweating collarbone, his chest, the palms of his hands; Sophia let out a trill of forgetfulness, and skittered across the bedroom to the basin to wash her right hand, then back before it could dry, flicking a sprig of cold droplets across Francis’ nape to make him grouse and chuckle. She took up her place at James’s head, folded her knees below her, and kissed his forehead sweetly. Francis’s breath ghosted across the back of her neck, bared where her soft hair spilled over James’s face. 

“Fuck him well, Francis my dear,” she sighed, and James, below her, echoed the sentiment deeply.

It would not take long. She had done much of the leg work, after all.

Kneeling between James’s legs, Francis ran his palms up the backs of his thighs as if smoothing the tremors from James’s muscles. The touch had the opposite effect; Francis himself trembled also. Sophia felt it all. The bed was the skin of a drum stretched between them, transmitting every twitch. Francis spat into his own hand and slicked himself, movements rough with haste.

“Slowly, dearest,” Sophia reminded him. A soft, desperate murmur escaped James’s throat as Francis paused, with some considerable effort; the tip of his prick nuzzled up to where Sophia’s fingers had worked James open not a minute before.

Francis met her gaze, a flicker of their silent language flitting between them. Wordless syllables constructed in stuffy parlor rooms and at crowded dinner parties, on chaperoned walks through Hyde park with Sophia’s arm snug in his own; a language which trawled deep through the years between them and which they had long used to express sentiments of greater complexity than what Sophia’s eyes told him now.  

Francis's lips parted. The smile that played at the edges of his lips was almost boyish.

Grasping at Francis’s arm, James’s hair tickled Sophia’s shin as he turned his head. When he spoke his voice was less than steady. “If you do not intend to include me in your conferences, I’d at the very least prefer you act on them.”

“Petulant,” Sophia said, stroking his hair back from his damp forehead.

She had indeed done her work well. Francis slid into him with barely any effort at all but for the low grunt driven up from the very bottom of James’s lungs. His fingers tightened on Francis’s arm; his other hand, clumsy in its distraction, fumbled its way to Sophia’s knee. She covered it with her palm and slid her own narrow fingers in the gaps between his own, felt the twitch in the tendons on the back of his broad hands as Francis worked his way wholly inside.

It was a fine thing, to see them this way. James’s legs pushed up around Francis’s thick waist, Francis bent over his flushed body like a starving man bowed over a laden table. Perhaps the comparison was indelicate; yet it was impossible not to think of hunger, in moments such as these between them. She had seen the two of them entwine like desperate, devouring creatures, needing only to fill that ache; not tonight. They were off duty, far from the sea, and worlds away from the ravenous north. If the spaces it had carved within them remained, well. Here, they could be filled.  

“ _Slowly_ ,” she repeated, chiding now, raising her fingers to drag them through Francis’s thinning hair. He nodded again, his eyes on James’s face, and proceeded with greater diligence. Moving his hips back and forth, his lips parted in concentration. James’s fingers squeezed a meaningless rhythm against her knee, chin bobbing against his neck with the effort of silence.

“How does he feel?” Sophia asked.

James’s body jolted against the sheets as Francis seated himself fully. “Lovely,” Francis said, voice tight, and the low sound which escaped James’s throat was quite lovely indeed.

“I think we ought to keep him like this for a time, don’t you?” she said, all sweetness.

“Whatever you think is best,” Francis managed, and James managed nothing but to keep his breathing even.

For a while the only sound in the close room was obscene. Stoicism was a natural attitude for James and Francis both, in pleasure as in pain; but it had ever been Sophia’s satisfaction to cure Francis of his reticence, and her new delight to find James a similar challenge. Men, she thought, were strange creatures of muted emotion; hysteria lived lower in their gut, and Sophia was diligent in coaxing it forth.

“Christ.” James licked his lips, eyes roving between the two of them. “I’m—uncertain how long I can endure this.”  

“We’ll find out together, hm?” There was wickedness in Sophia’s voice as she stroked her fingers through James’s hair where it lay growing steadily more mussed on the sheets, his head turning and twisting as if in the throes of a fever dream.

A stuttering laugh. “Francis, how did you survive her on your own?”

“By her leave alone,” Francis said and there was no question that Sophia must kiss him; must lean forward and drag her lips against the sweat on his brow, the taste of the sea on all their skin. Francis strained forward to chase her mouth, a soft noise from James below; and yet artless as their exertions had left them it was no hardship at all to kiss him, long and slow and deep.

“Francis.” James squirmed against the sheets. They had quite forgotten themselves, the slow and deliberate motions of Francis’s body halted. Without pulling back Sophia traced her fingers down James’s chest and up his neck, feeling the flutter of pulse and breath.

“Oh Christ—Francis, _please_ —”

“It’s not me you ought to ask,” Francis said, breathless and pleased against Sophia’s cheek. James’s long fingers twisted around her own.

“Mrs Crozier—” James tried; and it was no small thrill of delight that moved through her, at the roughness of their shared name in James’s melodic voice. Such devotion required a reward.

“By your leave then, Francis,” she said, leaning back; and the noise James made as Francis began to fuck him in earnest was torn straight from the depths of him. James’s fingers dig into her calf, the other making red marks in the slick curve of Francis’s shoulder; she could feel those marks pressing her skin, could feel Francis’s thrusts, could feel her own fingers twinning in James’s hair—

She untangled her limbs and slid down the bed, nestling at James’s side. Every movement of Francis’s body into James’s she could feel also in her own. Francis’s hand groped for her waist and then lower; her own fingers slipped to encircle James’s length and move in the same rhythm, the same perfect rhythm for them all.

James spent first, arching off the bed with a shout. A surge of warmth and wetness against Sophia’s palm. No sooner had he collapsed dazed and limp against the sheets than Sophia pulled Francis to her: flushed and swearing and fumbling to wipe himself on the sheets, Sophia positively militant as she yanked him against her and then inside, still half on top of James, their legs a senseless tangle.  

In a few short thrusts Francis came, crying and trembling with his face in the warm space between Sophia’s neck and James’s shoulder beside her. His fingers were all she needed, pressing into the damp curls of her sex, with his length slowly going slack within her. The end beat through her like wings, like something lifting away.

After it was quiet, as it always was with them.

They settled together as naturally as gravity, James pressed to Francis’s back and Sophia’s nose pressed to Francis’s clavicle. Sweat melded their skin together, toes probing at ankles and calves, hands and arms a thicket. The air was thick with the smell of their sex, the sheets damp, the heat soon to be uncomfortable; but in that moment there was no separating them, not even out from themselves.

“I am not entirely certain we’ll be able to sleep in this bed tonight,” James said at last, and Sophia’s laughter bubbled out of her rich and light as champagne. Francis’s arm lay heavy around her back, James’s hand reaching across Francis to toy with the curve of her hipbone. As for their entangled legs, there was no distinction to be made. In a moment they would rise and wash, dress, recall propriety, perfume themselves in a kind of gently mocking decorum, as if remembering their places in the world but never fully adhering—

In a moment, though.


End file.
